Google is making a map of methane leaks for the whole world to see
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
https://www.bristol.ac.uk/research/impact/stories/greenhouse... https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/603350
Reporting their findings again in Nature (2019), the group showed that CFC-11 emissions in eastern mainland China were around 7,000 tonnes per year higher in 2014–2017 than in 2008–2012. While this finding did not explain the full increase in CFC-11 levels seen since 2013, at 40–60% of the global rise, it represented a very significant fraction.
Crucially, the researchers also showed that the increase occurred in a specific region, primarily the north-eastern provinces of Shandong and Hebei.
https://www.coolingpost.com/world-news/chinese-selling-r12-a...
And also, the scale of methane leaks compared with cfc11/12 means that even though they have ~3-4x the GWP of methane, the impacts of poorly tracked methane leaks are astronomically higher.
https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...
The bulk of the methane emission events displayed on the (excellent) portal you linked come from EMIT, an imaging spectrometer on ISS.
EMIT was made to map ground mineral composition for climate studies, but it does gather a visible-to-IR spectrum across the mid-latitudes at a 60m resolution. This spectrum bears the imprint of any atmospheric methane, allowing them to back out a CH4 concentration from the spectrum as a side product separate from the original mineral-mapping goals.
(Some history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33427748)
Not saying that there haven't been and still are lots of subsidies for wind, solar and hydro, but it's obscene how much money has been given to the big players in "traditional" forms of energy creation.
there are a half-dozen such sensor missions.
https://gee-community-catalog.org/projects/ogim/
MSFT announced a commercial partnership to do the same not long ago.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-and-accentu...
In the USA, the news of other nations doing the same is not amplified. see GLOC 2023, Global Networking Forum. IAF
Last COP, heresay indicated that there was negotiations going on about how much legal identification of site ownership will be readily available. For example, an offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico leaks badly, but the owner is a contracting company at arms length. What does the map show to the public?
The bigger issue is whether the operator or their government has the funds or the willingness to do something about it... (E.g. Mexican president AMLO and PEMEX's leaking wells like Zaap C...)
The TROPOMI link is very dense and yes, exactly what the references above are.. excellent, so much to do
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/fossil-fuels
In the US industry has said that around 1% of gas coming out of the flare stack does not combust. Recent research has shown this is about 5x too low which makes a big difference in the ghg impact.
>The Nord Stream breach released between 56,000 and 155,000 tonnes of methane into the atmosphere, making it among the largest methane emissions ever recorded from a single point
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2342081-nord-stream-lea...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_dis...
????
Merkel had her way 16 years, her politics are exactly what got us here. This is a ridiculous statement.
Their reasons were only economical, this wasn't really a plan to prevent Russia from threatening their closest neighbours.
Merkels and Schröders are how we got here. German military is now planning for missile attacks against their infrastructure: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nato-russia-missile-strik...
Russia attacking the rest of Europe is just fear mongering.
Except perhaps for:
Livonian War The Polish-Russian War of the 1600s The Great Northern War The Russo-Turkish Wars The Partitions of Poland The Crimean War The Winter War The Invasion of Czechoslovakia or some other
Unfortunately this absolutely not the case, as applies to the Baltics and Moldova. The threat to those countries is very real.
Basically Putin's whole idea is that any place the Russian Empire (or its temporary proxy, the Soviet Union) sat on at one point or another in the past 350 years is fair game for re-occupation, vassalization and/or intimidation of some sort today.
Sabotage in Czech Republic, the Vrbětice explosion? They blew up the ammunition stockpile of some weapons trader that intended to sell them to Ukraine. That does not seem directed at the Czech Republic.
Maybe I am missing something, but the history of Transnistria sound not unlike many other civil wars to me.
And just to be clear, I am not supporting Russia, but we have to be real and stick to the facts. False judgments - no matter whether it is making Russia more or less evil than it is - can lead to bad decisions. In my opinion a random assortment of incidents like the ones you named are hardly enough to draw the conclusion that Putin wants to reestablish the Soviet Union.
If you look at Transnistria, it's definitely not a random civil war, but very much a proxy conflict (like breakaway republics in Georgia, or what Russia was doing in Eastern Ukraine 2014-2022).
In my opinion a random assortment of incidents like the ones you named are hardly enough to draw the conclusion that Putin wants to reestablish the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union, no. But what he does want is as much re-establishment as possible of Russia's historical "sphere of influence", and in Putin's mind, of Russia's role as the protector of Slavic culture and Eastern Orthodox values.
There are plenty of statements in support of this, all over the place, and very easy to find.
And maybe to add to the first point, sure, Russia certainly wants as much influence as it can get, but that is no different than every other country. There is of course a wide spectrum of means to achieve this, from economical cooperation, to supporting a coup d'état, to starting a war and a million things in between. Some we would consider legitimate, some not. That Russia would immediately jump to one of the most expensive options requiring a commitment for decades to succeed, that needs some pretty good evidence in my opinion.
That they have done so already in Ukraine is all the evidence we need, in my opinion.
The entire country, no.
By all indications, they only wanted to annex about 60 percent of it -- including of course the capital, the entire Black Sea coast, and likely a good chunk of buffer territory. The remaining regions, being almost entirely non-Russian speaking, would have been left as battered rump state, to be perhaps dealt with later.
The goal was clearly and unambiguously to wipe independent Ukraine off the map, and to eliminate as many of the intelligentsia on its kill lists as it could find. The remaining population was to be forcibly expelled or assimilated, as has already happened in the occupied regions.
All of which, by their planning, would have been basically cakewalk, and over and done in a matter of weeks.
Whether they wanted to properly annex 60 percent or 100 percent of Ukrainian territory is irrelevant in this context - and basically amounts to splitting hairs.
Tatcher, Merkel, Putin - if they would have a 10 year limit, things would be much better.
Putin being the prime example.
On the part of Germany, IMO it was/is a bundle of many things like Germany is very industry heavy and having cheap gas is a much needed advantage, to the point all those bright stoic German quality minds made their own country very dependent on Russia.
Also their historic and somewhat fascination with Russia, thinking they can "fix" them and be European brothers.
Also psyops, treason and corruption at the highest levels. Best known cases: Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel's early life and questionable policies.
I would say with 20/20 hindsight that turned out to be completely false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_2#Opposition
Obviously there's not much you can do with corruption.
> One of the last acts of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in office was to sign the deal creating the Nord Stream 1 project in 2005. Schröder subsequently became chairman of the company behind it and took several directorial positions in Russian energy companies in the following years.
The Aliso Canyon leak in LA in 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliso_Canyon_gas_leak) was comparable size (~100,000 tonnes CH4) and is also dimly recalled.
The more they look the more they keep finding. Some areas of the Permian in NM are so bad at 9% leakage rate that their GHG impact is worse than coal .
Industry of course is shocked (shocked!) and says they are on it. But methane monitoring rules during the Obama administration that could have revealed this sooner were rescinded under Trump at their behest. Presumably the same thing will happen with Bidens rules if Trump is reelected.
Edit: And its over 80 times (!) more warming than CO2 over a 20 year period.
https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-methane-is-sho...
Presumably someone with connections to big methane producers is spreading it?
There's debate over whether 100 years is an appropriate time period. Many say its too conservative given the nature of the heating that we face. Over a 20 year time frame the ghg factor is 84x. This has implications particularly when people think about feedback effects, ie methane increases heat which causes permafrost to melt and release more methane which increases heat, etc. Another feedback effect making the picture more complicated is that the decay rate of methane in the atmosphere decreases as the concentration increases.
However you cut it, methane in the atmosphere is increasing more rapidly than co2 despite its decay. Reducing it gives a lot of bang for the buck given that in industry most of the emissions come from a relatively few points in the infrastructure. There are of course other sources which are very challenging to reduce like agriculture.
The ghg potential for each is based on the 2nd order system impact and interaction with water vapor.
It isnt nearly as simple as some reactive index of the molecule itself
"Maguire said the same AI technology that Google used to detect trees, crosswalks, and intersections from satellite imagery would be applied to oil and gas infrastructure. The map would be overlaid with data from MethaneSAT to shed light on the type of machinery most susceptible to leaks."
MethaneSAT has sensors for methane [1]. So the guess work is in detecting an oilfield, the actual methane levels are no more guess work than a thermometer.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/09/16/advocates-hold-...